The Musical as Drama

orchestra. When it finally arrives, the “Mr. Snow” song has
great piquancy. The way is prepared for something solemn and
grand, which is how Carrie thinks her marriage will be, and yet
the tune itself is slightly beautiful and utterly conventional—
what the marriage will actually be, at best. Finally she has the
AABA structure under control. The drama is about finding
that structure as much as it is about these young people falling
in love.
The lead-in music to “If I Loved You” in the second half of
the scene (when Billy Bigelow replaces Carrie) is also formed
of eight- and sixteen-measure segments, ninety-two bars in all,
before Julie is in position to sing the formally structured AABA
love song. Again, the drama concerns the achievement of the
song. One of Billy’s segments is “You’re a Queer One, Julie
Jordan,” Carrie’s song from earlier in the scene, which he has
not heard. He knows it because he enters into the voice of the
musical, which in this case allows a tune to carry across from
one character to another. Billy’s “You’re a Queer One, Julie
Jordan” opens the way for Julie to sing another of Carrie’s ear-
lier themes, eight measures on “When I worked at the mill.”
But now the orchestra is changing the key. Instead of Carrie’s
unceasing G major, there are seven key changes in the ninety-
two measures of musical segments exchanged between Billy
and Julie. The orchestra is deepening the musical texture, but
the dramatic issue still concerns song—when will there be
one? The eight bars that lead to the establishment of D-flat for
the real song—“But somehow I can see, jes exactly how it’d
be”—give Julie a power she has been promising, a musical
power that the orchestra knows intimately, the power to pass
through E-flat as the way to modulate into the serious expres-
sion of song, then to an A-flat dominant as an outline of the
real key, D-flat, on “exack’ly how I’d be.” It is hard to believe
there is anyone who attends theatre at all frequently who
doesn’t know this modulation and where it leads, as Julie and
the orchestra reach the beginning of “If I Loved You.” It is one
of the memorable moments of modern drama.
What is happening in these cases of underscoring is that
musical time is being called away from the tight structures of

THE ORCHESTRA 137